There was a brief sighting of the Senator John McCain who’s been hard to find since entering the Witness Protection Program for politicians seeking to change their identity for election purposes.

His new guise comes as the senator is confronting his first serious primary challenge from his right, as J.D. Hayworth, the former congressman and talk-show host, pummels him for apostasies. McCain treats his former friend like a piece of lint he can brush off, but the guy has rattled him.

Maverick No More

Ever since Hayworth labeled himself the “consistent conservative,” McCain has wanted to be one as well. Thus did McCain claim to Newsweek that he’d never been a maverick, leaving us to wonder if he remembers three decades of reaching across the aisle, challenging his party on climate change, gay rights and spending. His old self is such an embarrassment he’s blotted out the inconvenient fact that he subtitled one of his books “The Education of an American Maverick.”

He long said he would follow the lead of top U.S. brass regarding gays in the military. Now that the brass is for dropping the policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” McCain isn’t.

He was for creating a national-debt commission before he was against it. And he uttered nary a peep of protest when the Supreme Court overturned part of his bid to reduce the role of money in politics.

Panicked Friend

Then McCain’s best friend, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, withdrew from a piece of energy legislation he’d written with Democrats, furious that Democrats were about to move forward on immigration in what he considered a “hurried, panicked manner.” The only panic, of course, is over McCain having to address the thorny immigration issue during his reelection campaign.

It wasn’t so long ago that McCain joined with Senator Edward Kennedy for Congress’s last great immigration reform effort, legislation that laid out a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, McCain pulled back from that under pressure from his base.